Oops

So my spelling is a little off. I'm on break... Yeah I know that is not an excuse.
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Forty minutes for a hot dog

Ok. So I go to Romano's in Redlands for a beer and a Chicago dog. Nice place but noisy. What you would expect. But to have to wait over 40 minutes for a hot dog is absolutely rediculus
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Tis the season... to waste a generation or two

The carnage has begun. The city of Colton has closed its libraries, Redlands is getting ready to lay off teachers, increase class size and reduce the services it provides to students. This appears to be a direct violation of the California state constitution which requires the state to provide a free and adequate education for all children. Next month the California School Boards Association will file a suit claiming this. It will be interesting to see just how all of this plays out. In the past the courts have sided with the state in such law suits, but with the massive amount of data available to support this suit, it just may realign what is considered to be an adequate free education. Since prop. 13 went on the books in California, public education has been hit hard. We went from 2nd in the nation to 47th in the amount of money spent per student. Rather sad when you consider that California has one of the largest and most diverse student populations in the country. After the budgetary ax falls, those who will remain will be rather angry, educated, and will most likely have really long memories. Budget cuts had better be fair and equitable as possible or my guess is that there will be hell to pay in the coming years. At will employees, Superintendents, and elected members of school boards throughout the state had better carefully consider all avenues of action as the political fallout of this impending disaster will last for years to come.

Whew!

It's been awhile, but I finally have my chapter 3 very rough draft done. Now comes the hard part. Editing the darn thing. Next I have to take the IRB online test, defend my proposal, get IRB approval, collect data and write it all up. If only my professional life would cooperate....

On another note, I attended a wonderful wedding reception for a former student. An interesting drink was served called a habanero margarita. Sweet and hot. Its base is a simple syrup infused with habanero pulp. Its a little too sweet for me. Now to get on with other doc. program stuff.

It's been awhile...

My professional life has been taking up every extra moment lately. That sucks big time. Time for some quality time in a bar....

The meaning of Herf...

Q. Recently I received an invitation to attend a cigar "herf". On looking through my dictionaries I found no entries for the term "herf". Do you have any information regarding this apparently new slang word?

A. This is a curious term, with an odd genesis.

It has now been firmly established, in part by the work of Barry Popik (see http://wwwords.org?HERF), that the term first appeared online:

I tried several when I first began smoking cigars and found them all to be very bland and almost impossible to herf, they were so tightly wrapped.

[A posting by somebody known only by his nickname Prince of Skeeves to the newsgroup alt.smokers.cigars, 21 Nov. 1996.]

A few months later the writer explained to the same newsgroup that he first heard the term at a "junior college in Clyde, Texas, in 1982 from a blueblood derelict friend of my named Stu" and that it referred to "the ungainly and humorous facial contortion required to deeply draw on a large, hand-rolled cigarette of unknown filling."

The word became popular in the newsgroup, leading to coinages such as "herfers", "herfnicks" and "herfaholics". A number of Web pages record that a herf, in your meaning of a meeting of cigar fans (a herf presumably being a situation in which one herfs) was arranged by members of the newsgroup in April 1997 under the title of The Texas Herf On The Lake. A newspaper report three years later about another meeting that had been organized through the newsgroup is one of the few times the term has appeared on newsprint:

They are cigar fanciers. More than 100 of them in all shapes

and sizes came to York recently to swap stories, down some

beer, and, of course, puff happily on their favorite stogies.

These get-togethers are called herfs, and they're a big deal

for people with computers, a love of cigars and a willingness

to travel.

[Daily Herald (Tyrone, Pennsylvania), 18 May 1999.]

"Herf" is well established within the cigar fraternity, though rare to the point of being unknown outside it. One site describes it as "A lively gathering of cigar-smoking comrades who meet in a club, restaurant, cigar store or home to share their appreciation of fine cigars."

That leaves us with the head-scratching problem of where the Prince of Skeeves got it from. I posed the question on the mailing list of the American Dialect Society. Douglas Wilson suggested it might be linked to the slang verb "huff", which is defined in the Historical Dictionary of American Slang as "to inhale the vapors of [a drug], as a method of becoming intoxicated", with examples going back into the 1960s. "Huff" and "herf" aren't so very far apart in sound.

Its been awhile...

Wow! Going back to work teaching really can get in the way of maintaining a blog. With all of the upcoming budget cuts and other public school matters like NCLB, one does not really have time to muse about the state of California.

One observation though... the next several generations of children here in California will not be in a position to do much as they will be tested to death and then they will not be able to find any work when they come out of high school because most of the NCLB tests don't have anything to do with the real world... just factoids that might be used on a TV trivia program. I think that is one of the basic flaws of NCLB; it does not reflect what is needed in the real world. It reflects what some people think is needed in the real world. No "scientific" educational research has been done to see if the end results that NCLB is supposed to give us will actually be useful in doing a job. Speaking of "scientific" research, of the 6 major studies sponsored by the Bush administration, 4 showed no effect and two showed minor effects. Hummm. Could it be that there is a real problem with assuming that everyone is capable of 100% in school?

L-8-ter